Free The Burning City (Spirit Binders) by Alaya Dawn Johnson Page B

the highest and the meanest. A peasant like you and a royal like myself.”
    “Squint at it another way and it all comes back around again. The buzzard and the god, eating catfish together by a pool.”
    “And what does that make me?” I said.
    Parech rolled on his side to look at me more directly. “The great spirit, tempting us outside.”
    I could not breathe. His nose was an inch from mine. What did that mean? That I tempted him? That I had power? How was the spirit bound with the gods in the garden? Didn’t it push them away? Banish them to another garden and await the coming of people? I wished I remembered the story more clearly.
    Then Tulo smacked Parech playfully, and the moment ended. “Aoi luring us outside? You’re the one who insisted we go to Okika, Parech! Having second thoughts?”
    Parech smiled his monkey smile, full of sly knowledge. “Oh no,” he said. “I predict good times for us in the Maaram city.”
    We were silent for a while after that, watching the sunset burn into night, and no one was eager to take the necessary steps back to our tiny shelter. Besides, what need had we of it on this warm night? Tulo was right. I’d never been happier than I was here, with these unexpected people.
    “What spirits are here, Tulo?” I asked, when it seemed the starlight was tricking me with glinting objects just outside of my field of vision.
    “There’s a water sprite in the pool who looks like a million tiny fishes all in one. And two creatures of the earth lumbering past. They always look like animals or plants, or both at once. And a death sprite is watching you, Aoi. I can always tell those by the little keys they wear.”
    I was too tired, too happy, for this fact to properly worry me. “Will I die tonight, then?”
    “Oh no. They’re often around you. You and Parech are like torches in a swamp—you draw all the creatures closer. But I think the death finds you curious. They do something else when they’re going to take someone. Something with their keys, but I can never quite see it.”
    I thought again to that glimpse I’d had of Tulo’s world when I had smoked the Maaram Ana’s herb. How strange to have to interact with this world when you could only see the other. And that reminded me of what Parech had said, of how the people Tulo so proudly defended had taken her sight and left her to die.
    “Why did they blind you?” I whispered, though there was no one to hear but Parech, and he breathed as though asleep.
    She moved closer to me, sliding her hand further across my belly. “For the warriors,” she said, her voice as low as mine. “We were losing too many battles, spilling too much of our blood. Our shaman—our Ana—thought to bind the spirits to make the warriors see farther, move faster. They needed a powerful sacrifice. So my father offered me.”
    “When? Were you young?”
    She shook her head. “My fourteenth year. I did. . .I was proud of my people, proud of our resistance. But I didn’t want to lose my sight. I wasn’t trading it for anything I’d get in return, you understand, like the shamans did in other tribes. I’d be sacrificing it in truth. And I was young and pretty and a princess, and now everything that made my life so perfect was making it. . .was ruining it. I thought about running, but they say that it matters if the sacrifice is willing. And I loved a boy who was fighting and didn’t want him to die because I was a coward. So the shaman let the spirits guide him and smacked me very hard in the back of my head. I fainted. And when I woke up I couldn’t see.”
    I laced my fingers through her own and squeezed. She had grown resigned to the horror, I suppose, but for me it was fresh. And yet, even so, I found my curiosity seizing on another part of the story. “And did it work?” I asked. “Did the sacrifice of your eyes make your warriors see farther? Did they win?”
    “Yes. For a while, it was everything we could have hoped for. We thought to